The primary reason Americans need guns is in case of general societal breakdown and chaos to protect themselves from others with guns. There is no guaranteeing the future political stability of the USA. When push comes to shove--and it likely will one day--the good Americans with guns will neutralize the bad Americans--with or without guns--and spike that chaos. Consider the 200 lb bad guy breaking into grandma's house, even if he's unarmed, but she has a gun and uses it.
--Brant
the Second Amendment is a secondary right codified in constitutional law; the primary right is the right to self defense which logically implies the right of someone to have the necessary tools for self defense; if the Amendment--or any Amendment for that matter--is repealed the primary right remains; anyone has the right to do anything one wants to and can do as long as physical force is not initiated

Personally. I'm on board the let's-not-have-nuclear war train.
The power of ideas generally plays out over decades and centuries. This is not the age of ideas. This is the age of the ossification of the left--a moral corpse covering and controlling the political landscape. Trump is pounding on the concrete.
For some reason--maybe a good one or many ones--the neo-cons want to stick it to Russia. They are allies of the deep state servicing the "idea." Trump seems to be on board with that one.
There were three seminal American Presidents: Washington (good), Lincoln (bad) and Wilson (worse than Lincoln). Trump may be the fourth (good?, bad?).
The left, generally speaking, hated and hates three people: Ayn Rand, Barry Goldwater and Donald Trump. On Trump they went total ape shit. He's not challenging them on their ideas--what ideas?, they stopped with the ideas in the 1960s with the Vietnam War protests and never looked back--but on their control of the American (and European) discourse to policies, most including AGW.
--Brant

The best one can do is hang his morally perfect hat on the non-initiation of force principle.
Objectivism never realized its natural gravitas through the integration of that principle with rational self interest. And libertarianism never found its moral footing by the same integration from the political perspective. The primary cause was Rand's blowing off libertarianism in what was obviously a turf war. She actually blew off politics, the weakest part of her philosophy, by blowing off almost all political soldiers, even avowed Objectivists--I mean, "students of Objectivism." So the libertarians blew her off, the likes of John Hospers notwithstanding.
Moralizing does not gravitas make. Starting with Galt's speech moralizing has been the leitmotif of Objectivism. What happened consequently has been the emasculation of would-be Objectivists always afraid of crossing Rand. Hence the evaporation of her intellectual empire under Peikoff, who tried to continue in kind until today's dead-end success.
The only way to transcend the religious gravitas of implicit American conservatism is through science and pantheism. Reality is God and God is Reality with its greater emphasis on empiricism. Jesus the son of God becomes Jesus the criticized prophet unless we all be--men and women--sons of God. Salvation through Jesus Christ becomes salvation through morality and rationality and right living. Hoi polloi can (could) and will (would) still find the Gestalt power of existential salvation through classical Christianity, no thinking required but still available for other uses through mental compartmentalization. Essentially faith is for the next world and reason is for this world. Or, faith is for the Sabbath and reason for the rest of the week, assuming no emergency requiring turning on the faith faucet when nothing else is to be done.
--Brant

Trump is not an Objectivist much less a libertarian. Not if he wants to use the state to wage a war on drugs.
Because he is President he is giving leftists everywhere a gigantic pain in the rear. What is most characteristic of the left is the arrogance of its moral hubris. Morally right they can't do wrong. This is why communists have gotten away with murdering tens upon tens of millions with essentially no regrets. The biggest regret they ever had--historically--was when Hitler and Stalin decided to be buddies--for a while. They were saved when Germany attacked Russia leaving the overt fascists/Nazis as the sole totalitarian bad boys celebrated that way since by Hollywood and the intelligentsia. They hated Ayn Rand for she was effectively against their game at the root--but she had no power. Trump too is against their game, but doesn't know its essentially a moral issue--but he has power. Hence, we are living in interesting times.
Ironically such as the ARI haven't a clue as to what is really going on. Official Objectivism has gone off the rails not understanding who and what the enemy is. The enemy is fascism. Not the overt kind as in Italy ended in and by WWII, but the fascism that underlies all that is not freedom: the use of force in and by politics and the advocacy of such.
The West--implicitly at least--is at war not against the Muslim religion--that's a war that can't be won--but against any fascist manifestations from same. The left is against this war because it is for fascism--as long as they aren't Nazis. (Never mind the past connection between Nazism and the Arab world.) That is the left is against freedom, except its own freedom to control and rule in the name of its righteousness, now without any of the intellectual pretensions they saturated the culture with in the 1930s through most of the 1960s.
--Brant